Nathan Zellner

Somewhere in The Curse (2023) the direction changes hands. Nathan Fielder takes some episodes, David and Nathan Zellner take others, and we could not tell you which is which, because the seams do not show. That is the right result for a series, and it is also the difficulty with writing about Nathan Zellner at all. Almost everything he has made, he has made with his brother, and the two of them have never been much interested in letting you see who did what.

They started in Austin in the late 1990s, Nathan arriving with a computer science degree from Texas A&M, and spent the next decade on shorts and features made for almost nothing, among them Goliath (2008) and Kid-Thing (2012), on which he produced, shot and acted. Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter (2014) got them noticed: he co-wrote, produced and played Robert in a dark comedy about an obsession that plays out like a fable. Damsel (2018) was his first credit as co-director, a western comedy with Robert Pattinson and Mia Wasikowska that plays against the genre's expectations. Sasquatch Sunset (2024) put him in a suit as the Alpha of a wordless Sasquatch family, and in between came the television.

The habits are consistent. An absurd premise, then patience: long takes, pauses left uncomfortably long, and a refusal to mock anyone on screen, however strange. The brothers have said of Kumiko that they "wanted to have a sense of humanity and compassion and empathy for her", and that is the note most critics keep hearing in the work, along with the complaints that come with it: that it can be so particular it shuts people out, that the tone slides between earnest and ironic until the feeling drains away, and that Sasquatch Sunset struck some as a short film wearing a feature's runtime. We have not reviewed those films and will not judge them here. We will note that they kept a homemade Sasquatch costume from their shorts and used it again in the feature, which tells you something about how they work.

What we can speak to is The Curse, and there the patience works. The series follows a couple filming a do-gooding property programme, Whitney in cream linen and heavy silver, Asher in polo shirts a size wrong in one direction or the other, and it is as uncomfortable as anything we have watched on television. We wanted, repeatedly, to switch it off, and did not, because the shot holds, nobody rescues the moment, and the embarrassment becomes the point. The middle episodes circle the same anxieties for longer than they need to, and the direction does not hurry them along. That is a flaw, shared evenly among three directors.

Where he goes next presumably depends on where David goes. On the evidence, the pair will keep finding premises nobody else would attempt and then filming them as if they were perfectly ordinary. If a solo credit ever turns up, we will be curious to see what he has been doing all this time.